


The Boy with the Green Eyes

by FarmlandTensions



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Artist Levi, M/M, WWII, War, World War II
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-05-29
Updated: 2014-07-14
Packaged: 2018-01-27 02:10:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 3,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1711178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FarmlandTensions/pseuds/FarmlandTensions
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Reincarnation is a funny thing</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Levi Ackerman

Levi Ackerman (c. 1583-1632) was a Flemish-born French painter, most known for his “Boy with the Green Eyes”. He was born in Antwerp to Jewish parents, and lived in Paris throughout his artistic career.

 

Contents

1 Early history  
2 Artistic Career  
3 “The Boy with the Green Eyes”  
4 Reputation  
5 Death  
6 References

 

Early History

Ackerman’s family line originated in France, but were driven out during the Jewish Expulsion of 1394. At this time, they fled to Provence, but were forced to leave in 1501 after Provence became a part of France and anti-semitic laws were brought in. Ackerman was born c. 1583 to a French-Flemish parents. He studied drawing from a young age and joined the Guild of St Luke in Antwerp as an apprentice in 1591.

 

Artistic Career

Although Ackerman studied painting from a young age, his artwork did not receive recognition until his mid-twenties. In journal entries and early articles, Ackerman is quoted as saying he received his inspiration from a dream. Several artists who learned in the same studio claimed that he was a mediocre artist who became a maestro overnight. Ackerman’s portraiture became quite popular, and he was commissioned by many wealthy families. He moved to Paris in 1612 and his popularity continued in France.

 

“The Boy with the Green Eyes”

Levi Ackerman’s most famous painting is “The Boy with the Green Eyes”, currently residing in the National Art Institute in Trost. Contrary to popular belief, the subject of the painting is not the son of a wealthy patron. Ackerman painted the boy on numerous occasions, his earlier versions gaining less attention than his most complete piece. Several of his notebooks feature sketches that resemble The Boy. The only sources discovered to date on the identity of the boy are two interviews with Ackerman from his later years. At this time, his only comment on the boy’s identity was that he was “someone [Ackerman] held dear, many lifetimes ago.” It is thought among historians that the boy was a childhood friend from Antwerp, perhaps one who died at a young age.

 

Reputation

Ackerman’s reputation among his peers was low until his sudden increase in productivity c. 1609. Until this point, he had no reputation to speak of among patrons, but after his initial paintings of The Boy, he gained some positive attention and became a well-requested portrait artist. His popularity as an artist is likely the main reason he was permitted to remain in France after he left Antwerp. During the time he spent there, Judaism was still frowned upon in the country, and French Jews had little rights. However Ackerman made an easy living off his paintings and was never deported for his religion.

In modern times, Ackerman’s work is popular among LGBT communities, as they believe his obsession with The Boy was indicative of homosexuality, however there is no historical evidence to support these claims.

 

Death

Ackerman died in Paris in 1632. The exact date of death is unknown. He was never married.


	2. Ardennes Forest, May 21st 1940

The visions began in the early morning.

He complained to a comrade of a headache.

By afternoon, his overall demeanor had changed.

This was not the first battlefield he had been on. Though until this day he believed it was.

He spoke with an experience in war beyond his 19 years of life. Superiors praised him, gave thanks to Hitler Youth for a well-trained soldier. No-one mentioned the fact that he’d seemed as green as any of the other boys just a day before.

The trek through the forest ran smoothly in the beginning. Approximately 3pm, he began calling comrades by names they didn’t know.

Connie, Jean, Armin. 

Everyone let it slide. 

French troops approached at 7pm. Most were caught in gunfire, some died in a grenade blast, others retreated.

The German soldiers shielded themselves among the trees, few were injured. 

Some time after 9pm, Jaeger became incoherent. He formed a strategy to pursue a captured soldier he could see on enemy lines. Claimed that the man was calling his name and was in need of immediate assistance. His superior ordered him to stand down. 

At 9:42pm, Eren Jaeger died in battle. He was shot down by French troops after running from his cover directly into enemy fire. The soldier he tried to save existed only in his mind.


	3. Jaeger

 

Eren jolted out of his daydream as he felt a pen jabbing his arm. He turned to the boy beside him with a scowl, ready to rip him a new asshole for interrupting his escape from boredom, but his words caught in his throat as he saw the boy’s face.

 

His angry frown quickly eased into a concerned expression and his mouth moved to form the words “Are you okay?”

 

He began to feel uneasy as the boy beside him continued to stare at him, wide-eyed and pale. He turned to see if he could catch the attention of his teacher, only to find he already had it. Ms. Davison was staring directly at him, mouth opening and closing as if her mind had been switched with that of a fish, and as he glanced around, Eren became aware of just how many eyes were focused directly on him.

 

What had he done? It’s not like this was the first time he’d ever zoned out in class. It was actually a pretty regular occurrence, and he was fairly confident that he had never really been subtle about it. He rubbed at his face subconsciously as all eyes in the class continued to stare at him.

 

He cleared his throat and began speaking, but all that came out was “Eh, what’s go-” before a book was shoved into his hands. He looked down, brows furrowing again, and froze.

 

There he was, looking back up at himself from the newest edition of the art book listed as a requirement on the school curriculum. There was his face, his eyes, his smile, all captured in perfect detail in a photograph of an old painting. If he’d been the kind of student who looked through his work ahead of time he would have seen it earlier. But this was his first time seeing the page. He gently traced his finger over his own image, not sure what it meant.

 

He let his eyes wander down to the caption beneath it. “The Boy with the Green Eyes” by Levi Ackerman, 1626. It was an apt title anyway, not that it helped him any. But the name was familiar, and he didn’t know how.

 

It didn’t make sense. It had to be some kind of joke.

 

He pushed the book aside and flipped to the same page in his own book, but there he was again. He looked up at his teacher again, eyes searching, lost.

 

“How…” He trailed off, unsure of how best to end the sentence.

 

The teacher shook her head and blinked, cleared her throat, explained that it was a coincidence. She laughed nervously and babbled on about uncanny likenesses and how she hadn’t come across a student who looked so like a painting before. The class played along. Eren played along. The atmosphere of the room didn’t become any less tense for the remainder of the class.

 

 

* * *

 

 

He went to the library immediately after class, checked all the art books for mentions of Ackerman, hoping to find something more than books could give him.

 

And he found it. He got exactly what he was looking for, and it hurt so much he wished he could give it back.

 

Images flooded through his mind that he couldn’t make sense of, his senses filled with sensations from places he hadn’t been, and it made no sense to him. He read through every account he could find, his mind racing with thoughts of another world that he didn’t understand.

 

And then he reached a line in a book, a quote from a sick and dying man. The Boy with the Green Eyes was someone he held dear, many lifetimes ago.

  
He gasped when he realised tears were streaming down his face, clutched at his chest when he realised he knew exactly why they were there.


	4. Memories

 

I’ve remembered since the day I was born. 

 

Fighting for my life. First on the streets, later on the battlefield. All the deaths I witnessed, friends and family and fellow soldiers. 

 

It didn’t come all at once. Just flashes here and there. Memories from a different life that filled my mind as I was making memories in this one. 

 

I never doubted they were memories.

 

My parents found it strange when I asked about them at first. It didn’t take me long to realise that it wasn’t normal. That most people didn’t have two sets of memories. But I never doubted they were real. I knew they were real. I remembered.

 

And I remembered him.

 

Shared glances, content silences, fond appreciation. I remember hero worship easing out into something more equal. I remember the warmth of his body. I remember the colour of his eyes and the sound of his laugh. And I remember the tightness in my chest as I held his limp form and watched the life fade from his eyes.

 

Growing up I thought he was a friend. In my teenage years, I presumed he was a lover. After that I realised he wasn’t really either.

 

A subordinate who somehow managed to capture my heart. Not that he ever knew. And I don’t know how he would have taken it if he did.

 

There was never a time in my life when I didn’t remember his presence. And no-one I knew in this life ever lived up to him. I never met a person I craved like I craved him. When I was younger, I used to cry when I thought about the fact that I remembered this man I loved and yet knew we could never be together. I’m weaker in this life, the version of me who lived through my memories would never cry about something so trivial. But I did. I cursed this life for giving me these memories. I could handle the fighting, the blood, the deaths. But I couldn’t handle seeing him.

 

It never occurred to me that I could remember for a reason. That he could be here too, that I might find him and live out my days with him.

 

I just accepted that no-one else remembered. That none of the faces I saw in this life were ones I remembered from the other.

 

I was angry at myself when it finally dawned on me. When I saw a familiar face on television as I was mindlessly scrolling through channels. 

 

I was livid. I couldn’t believe I had never even tried to look him up, to find out if he was out there somewhere now, or even if there was anyone who shared these memories at all. I’d just taken it for granted that it was my curse, and mine alone to bear.

 

All it took was seeing one recruit I barely even knew but had worked with enough to recognise their face.

 

At first I didn’t know what to do. The kid on TV didn’t look like someone who’d lived through the horrors I knew they had. From what I remembered, his family had become titans, his whole village destroyed, and there he was on some shitty reality show looking like the happiest little shit in the world. 

 

If I really could find the boy of my dreams, would he even remember me?

 

If he did remember me, was there any chance at all he felt the same way about me that I had felt for so long about him?

 

It didn’t seem likely. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised I couldn’t just leave this alone. I needed to at least know if he was out there somewhere.

  
And then I began my search.


	5. The Search

 

Looking for Eren proved to be a long and arduous task.

 

It’s not like I had never used the internet before, it had been around for a while by now, but I’d never had to rely on it so heavily. I scoured the web for mentions of his name, by any spelling I could think of, and came up short a thousand times before I came to yet another dead end that couldn’t be him. Or shouldn’t be him. I kept the page open anyway to come back to later if my search continued to be fruitless.

 

After several hours, I went back through the pages I’d left open. Most were useless, but one caught my eye.

 

It was old, though. Far too old. Old enough that I hoped it was as much not him as the others, but the mention was so vague I couldn’t be certain. Just a name in a list of names, soldiers mentioned in an article, new recruits in Germany over half a century ago, and I hoped so hard it wasn’t him but something in my gut told me it was. That any version of the boy I once knew would be as determined to fight for his cause as he was back then.

 

But I needed to be certain.

 

 

* * *

 

I spent the following weekend in the library. I took every book on the war and Nazi Germany I could find and sat at a table in a quiet corner. The boy mentioned in that article had only been one soldier, unlikely to be anyone of note, but I needed to find him.

 

I checked all the indexes for mentions of Jaeger or Yeager or Yager, and came up blank every time. 

 

By the end of my second day there, I’d resigned to flicking through pages as opposed to reading them thoroughly, knowing I wouldn’t get a chance to come back and read the rest for at least another week.

  
And that’s when I saw it.

 

There wasn’t a name. Not his, not anyone else’s. But I didn’t need one. Because there was his face. His beautiful, perfect, angry and determined face. Exactly the way I remembered it. He was glaring down the barrell of a gun, aiming it over a trench. It seemed to me he was destined to end up in war.

 

Not destined to end up with me.

 

I hated myself in that moment. I had thought, for one short while, that everything wasn’t hopeless. That I had been brought back with these memories not to torture me, but so I could find the man I had once loved, that I would always love, and we could finally have a happy life. And then I found out he had been born so long before me.

 

I didn’t know if he was still alive, but it didn’t matter anymore. If he had survived the war, he would be in his eighties by now, nineties even. He would have lived a long life, and it would have been a life without me. 

 

I’d never admitted to my feelings in our past life, never acted on them. I didn’t know if he’d ever had a clue how I felt about him, and I had no idea if he’d ever felt the same. For all I knew, in this life he could have been happily married, lived a long, full, content life with some woman who made him happier than he ever had a chance to be in our old world. He could have been in love with someone who wasn’t me, and that was probably what was best for him.

 

I hated myself for being selfish enough to hope he had felt the same way, and was around now for me to claim as my own. 

 

I left the library at closing time, having spent the time coming up to it staring at that picture in that old book.

  
When I got home, I ordered a copy of the same book for myself. 


	6. Art Gallery

I must have read that book a thousand times in the next few years. I searched for answers I never found. I never looked for them anywhere else. That book, that photo. They were the end of the line for me. Reminders of something I could never have. Someone.

 

When I thought about him, I could never decide which made-up life I prefered. One where he died in the war, where I didn’t have him but no-one else did either. Or one where he survived, found a wife, lived happily with her. I wanted him to be happy, it wasn’t that I didn’t want that. But I didn’t want anyone else to have him. And thinking they did was painful. But thinking he died on the battlefield twice was also painful.

 

There was no version of Eren Jaeger’s story that made me happy.

 

 

* * *

 

About five years after I found the book, I recognised a photo on a poster. It wasn’t my photo, it wasn’t him. But it was another I had seen in the book. And it made me stop. The writing on the poster advertised a local art gallery, told me there was an upcoming exhibition on photography from the war. I felt it had caught my eye for a reason, that I needed to be there, needed to see his face in the original photograph. Like it would bring me closer to him. I knew it wouldn’t. Not really.

 

I went to the exhibition on a Tuesday morning, when I knew there would be few people there to interrupt me or question my actions. I skimmed through the photos on the wall until I found him, and stood for a long time staring at his face, immortalised in a single picture.

 

It could have been hours that I stood there, it felt like days. Years, even. Eventually I felt a stinging in my eyes, knew I had to take a break. I wandered through the rest of the gallery, planning to come back in a few moments. Most of the artwork went unseen as I walked, eyes glazed over. I wasn’t really there for the art.

 

And then something caught my eyes. A beautiful pair of bright green eyes, a familiar face. My gaze shot to meet them immediately, and I wasn’t even disappointed when I saw they were painted on a large canvas. They were beautiful, perfect. And I hadn’t seen that vibrant colour yet in this lifetime. I glanced around at the rest of the paintings in the room, half hoping to find him again, and paused when I realised something didn’t add up.

 

They were too old.

 

None of the paintings in this room were from the 20th century. So what was a portrait of a Nazi soldier doing here?

 

I stepped closer to the painting, inspected the plaque beside it that gave details of the artist and artwork, and felt my heart stop.

 

 _The Boy with the Green Eyes_  
Levi Ackerman, c. 1615

 

* * *

 

 

I was out of breath by the time I reached my home. I’d ran practically the whole way. There was no way there was another Levi Ackerman out there, and I needed to find out if this artist was me.

 

If I had been reincarnated twice, there might still be hope of an Eren in this lifetime.

 

There was always a chance his first reincarnation was back in the 17th century, but if he had been with the earlier version of me, then at least I could know I was happy once. That there was a life where Levi Ackerman and Eren Jeager spent their lives together.

 

I opened my laptop quickly as I sat at my desk, and quickly pulled up a search for “Levi Ackerman artist”. And there I was. A whole wiki article, a lot of which was dedicated to this Boy with the Green Eyes. Apparently he painted him a lot. Over and over, like he was thinking of him at all times. I could understand how he felt.

 

As I read through the page, I realised this Levi had never had a life with Eren. That he dreamed of the old life I remembered, caught glimpses of the boy he loved. Never did it say he loved him. I’ll admit that I snorted a laugh when I read about the LGBT movement speculating on my homosexuality, but never did the article say that the Boy was real, or that Levi had loved him. And for some reason the absence of those words felt tangible. I felt like the whole page was written with hopes of being able to say that, and there was disappointment filling the blanks instead. And it felt like the person who wrote it knew Levi, knew me. It couldn’t be someone who was alive when he was, and it certainly wasn’t anyone that I knew now. And for some reason that prompted me to check the edit list. To see who had written this wiki page. Maybe they were someone from my past, from that other life. Or maybe I could offer them some more insight, let them know how Levi really felt.

 

My breath caught in my throat when I saw the username that had made the most edits on the page. My fingers itched to send a message, to let them know who I was. But I was too afraid. Too afraid I was wrong, or I was reading too much into something. Too afraid I would scare them away or mess up somehow.

 

I decided right then to make my own account, make my own edit.

 

 

* * *

 

“The Boy with the Green Eyes”

 

Levi Ackerman’s most famous painting is “The Boy with the Green Eyes”, currently residing in the National Art Institute in Trost. Contrary to popular belief, the subject of the painting is not the son of a wealthy patron. Ackerman painted the boy on numerous occasions, his earlier versions gaining less attention than his most complete piece. Several of his notebooks feature sketches that resemble The Boy. The only sources discovered to date on the identity of the boy are two interviews with Ackerman from his later years. At this time, his only comment on the boy’s identity was that he was “someone [Ackerman] held dear, many lifetimes ago.” Levi created many paintings of the boy, Eren Jaeger, who he had fallen in love with in a past life but never got the chance to confess to.

**Author's Note:**

> Based on [this prompt I wrote](http://farmlandtensions.tumblr.com/post/79996083675/oh-man-i-just-had-the-best-idea-about-how-you), which is an extension of [this prompt](http://farmlandtensions.tumblr.com/post/79094210139/reincarnation-au-from-levis-pov-where-he) with inspiration from [BlondeRinglet](http://hemademefeellikeihadaheart.tumblr.com/post/76247064642/ereri-reincarnation-au-idea)


End file.
